Excerpt from The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One

In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of the world with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths.

Eve was fifteen, reshaping herself more each day; Vera, just shy of thirteen, was a stubborn straight line. Jane, their mother, was a graduate student in paleobiology. Their father had died one year before, plunged into a shock-green mountain in a tiny car on a tiny road in Italy where he was doing research for an article. Now they were three. Girls, sad and angry and growing and trying. Mom, sad and angry and trying. Hauling their bodies across the scoop of sky to get to a bare place, a lost place where ancient beasts had once roamed. Somehow, they hoped, this trip would be the beginning of a new road. Gentler, ascending.

* * *

Jane's professor had grown a beard for the trip to Siberia, and Todd, a postdoc, wore all tan safari clothing. Everything had several pockets and zipped into different configurations. In New York, Vera watched Todd zip off the legs to his pants and jog laps around the terminal in shorts and hiking boots, his stained white athletic socks like burned-down candles. The professor plugged in a full power strip to charge his computer, tablet and two phones and then ate three kale salads out of plastic to-go containers. He said, "We're unlikely to get fresh veggies. I want to vitamin-load."

Vera wondered if the professor was someone's father.

During their five-hour layover in Moscow Jane brought blini with caviar on a real plate to the seats where her daughters were draped, sleepy and prickling.

"Airport fish eggs, Mom, I don't know," Vera said. She wanted a burrito.

"You're in junior high, what do you know? They're actually so good," Jane said, sour cream on her lips.

Eve said, "I'm in high school, but I still find this embarrassing."

Todd, in the next row of chairs, again zipped his pant legs off and slung them over his carry-on, then jogged the halls. Eve made a hand flourish and said, "Exhibit A." Vera watched the Russians watch Todd and it seemed possible that he alone might inspire a war between the two countries. Americans, if this was any indication, needed to be put out of their misery. It would have been a service.


As the sun was going down, they boarded a plane that would take them from Moscow to Yakutsk. The stewardesses in stilettos served chicken cutlet and sweet wine. The plane crossed six time zones and they had only traveled two thirds of the way across Russia.

Eve and Vera played a favorite game, Fortunately/Unfortunately, a game that had traveled with them on buses, planes, ships, trains all over the globe.

"Once there were two sisters who wanted to run away," Eve started.

Vera said, "Fortunately, they had large bags full of precious gems."

"Unfortunately," Eve continued, "the gems were heavy and the girls couldn't carry them."

"Fortunately, they came upon a cave where they could hide the bags until they had a way to transport them."

"Unfortunately, there was a wild and ferocious bear living in the cave."

Vera smiled at her older sister. "You always put a ferocious bear."

"It's a classic."

The story was, by design, endless. Meant to carry the girls across land and sea, every piece of bad news immediately followed by the upswing of salvation.


It was morning again when they landed, dawn a fine pink stripe on the horizon. Vera felt broken by tiredness. She was not a person anymore but a hunger for sleep. The tarmac smelled like fire and melt.

This was the coldest city on earth in winter and all the photos in the hotel lobby were of people with iced eyelashes, men in fur suits with fur hoods selling fish in the outside market and everything shimmered with frost and the fish were frozen but not because they had been in a freezer. It was summer now but Vera could sense the threat of cold.

Excerpted from The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel. Copyright © 2023 by Ramona Ausubel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.